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Musharraf's Mega Dam

A Fight against Time and the Water Level

By Joachim Hoelzgen

It now appears inevitable that Pakistan will construct the Basha Diamer Dam, imperilling a cultural legacy that goes back to the end of the Ice Age. With time running out, German archeologist Harald Hauptmann is racing to document the area's thousands of cliff carvings before they are lost.

This is the second installment of a two-part series. You can read the first part here.

Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf wants to go down in history as the great man who brought modernity to the Islamic Republic. It's a goal he plans to achieve by building dams -- impressive, large-scale construction projects that are highly controversial even in his own country.

The electricity produced by the dams' turbines will enable Pakistan to make a great leap forward. And the water from the reservoirs is also expected to make agriculture -- the very basis of existence for the rapidly growing nation of 160 million -- flourish.

Without artificial irrigation, Musharraf would be the ruler of a desert land. And since the days of British colonial rule, canals have secured the country's food needs by allowing for the cultivation of wheat and rice. They also make possible the cultivation of cotton, Pakistan's most important export product. But many of the country's pipes leak and allow the water to evaporate. This causes water shortages in the major cities during the summer, including the capital, Islamabad.

To solve the problem, Musharraf -- who is also Pakistan's military leader -- has announced plans to construct five massive dams before everything dries up. "We are damned to build dams," he says.

The so-called Basha Diamer Dam west of the village of Chilas represents the cornerstone of Musharraf's dam policy. Preliminary work on the construction of the project has begun in a winding Indus River valley. A monumental, 270-meter (886-foot) retaining wall will soon be erected here. It will have to be 200 meters (656 feet) thick at its base -- which is spectacular in itself -- just to stand in place and to hold back the Indus River. Beyond the wall, the river will form a reservoir that runs 100 kilometers (62 miles) long and winds past the Nanga Parbat and right up to the famed Rakhiot Bridge, the point from which trekkers and climbers embark to scale the mountain.

Higher than Three Gorges

A German engineering firm designed the dam, which will be 85 meters (279 feet) higher than China's Three Gorges Dam. It's the first time such a high dam construction is being built with rolled concrete, says Rolf Wiegand, who heads the dam-building unit of Lahmeyer International in Bad Vilbel near Frankfurt. "The concrete is transported to the construction site via conveyor belts. That's faster, and it's then compressed into rolls on the dam's surface," he explains.

No punches are being pulled when it comes to electricity generation either: Eight turbines will be put into operation here. Putting them in place, however, will be a complicated process. The terrain downriver along the Karakoram Highway is rugged and the bridges crossing the river aren't strong enough to sustain the weight of the giant turbines. The company plans to transport them to the site in smaller pieces, and they will then be assembled once they get there.

The dam project, though is a ticking time bomb for Heidelberg-based archeologist Harald Hauptmann's work. Diamer's natural galleries of rock carvings -- which today still bear testimony to cults, foreign dynasties and the migration of peoples -- will be lost forever. Almost all the art works will be flooded by the reservoir, where they will be eroded by the sand and detritus of the Indus River. The small number that remain -- about 2,000 petroglyphs -- will fall victim to a widening of the Karakoram Highway, which must make room for entire fleets of construction machines. Further up, on the hill slopes, white numbers the size of houses mark the location where a new stretch of the highway will have to be built. Parts of the existing route will be submerged under the future reservoir's waters.

Over 10,000 years of human history

The stone carvings here, which date back to the end of the Ice Age, trace the legacy of human history at the intersection between the Hindu Kush and Himalaya mountain ranges like a time-lapse film. The magnitude of the loss will be enormous. When hunters and gatherers first began carving the rocks here around 9000 BC, they drew wild animals and the first form of graffiti: prints of hands and feet that were presumably intended to mark the presence of human beings.

And what human beings they were. During the Bronze Age, depictions of faceless giants -- some of whom stretch their arms skyward -- were all the rage among petroglyph artists. The hair of the giants forms curls and spikes and looks like antennae -- giving them a science fiction-like quality. Hauptmann believes the figures represent demons and spirits, an interpretation that is backed up by a local legend in and around Chilas. According to this legend, the people by the Indus River believed that giants lived under the ground and caused earthquakes when their movement became aggressive.

The Karakoram Highway, built by Pakistan's military and an army of Chinese workers during the 1970s, follows ancient paths pretty closely. Those paths were the gateway from Central Asia to the Indian subcontinent and eventually became the southern axis of the Silk Road, the historical set of trade routes that caravans carrying silk and spices, gold, porcelain, furs and precious stones traveled along.

At the beginning of the first millennium before Christ, the road south attracted the Scythians -- a heavily armed, horse-riding people that scalped its enemies. German ethnologist Karl Jettmar believed that today's Pashtuns, who live in the border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan (and from whom the Taliban have emerged) are descendants of the Scythians.

The Scythians proved to be masters at etching animal petroglyphs. The wild artists had the benefit, as they engraved their images into the rocks, of a dry and hot climate, which causes a patina of ferrous oxide and manganese to form on the rock -- a kind of desert varnish. Scratching and scribbling on this surface is still easy today -- and Pakistani truck drivers actually do so, etching their names and the registration numbers of their vehicles into the rocks along the Karakoram Highway.

The Scythians were fascinated by ibex, deer and predators. They have left their most spectacular work on a boulder slab near the rope bridge over the Indus River that today connects Chilas with the neighboring village of Thalpan. The image represents a fleeing ibex, chased by a leopard.